Blacklight
by Lazurman
Summary: Alex Mercer flew away with that nuke fully expecting to die. He didn't. Now, in a world unlike his own, the Blacklight virus must find his own place in a world of heroes...and villains. The hunt begins again. Heroic!Alex, Alex/? IN FREEZER FOR LONG-TERM STORAGE


_**Blacklight**_

**A/N**

**Dear God, what have I done? lolz**

**Disclaimer: Our favorite viral monstrosity belongs to Activision, not me, and our favorite universe of heroes belongs to Marvel Studios, not me. Why do you assholes have to keep reminding me?! *cries in a corner***

**Chapter 1**

"Can't you disarm it?" the soldier standing behind the crouching man asked. He was busy securing the chains that held a nuclear bomb to a transport helicopter.

"No. There's no time. Randall fixed it so that it only ever had an on-switch."

The hooded man rose, having finished his preparations, and the soldier looked him in the eyes. Their faint blue glow was slightly disturbing in any case, but lacked the customary predatory glint. Instead, those eyes spoke of pain and sadness; possibly remorse as well? "Take care of her," he muttered. With that, the man acrobatically leapt into the pilot's seat of the vehicle, taking off as soon as the blades were up to speed.

General Peter Randall had believed that the only way to erase Blackwatch's _'mistake'_ had been to burn everything to the ground. The captain had disagreed. Smuggling the other man aboard the aircraft carrier hadn't been easy, but it been done. The plan: Kill Randall and disarm the nuke. Execution: FUBAR.

The soldier watched in silence as the helicopter sped away from the aircraft carrier. That nuke was going to go off at any second, and New York's only chance of survival rested in the hands of the one flying the chopper. A man widely condemned as the cause of the viral outbreak that had plagued Manhattan; a man that had single-handedly killed thousands of people; a man who, by all rights, deserved to die.

That man was now in the process of saving New York at the cost of his own life.

Captain Robert Cross gazed at the rapidly disappearing helicopter, and saluted. He would make sure that Dana Mercer remained out of Blackwatch's hands; Zeus deserved at least that much for his sacrifice.

**DX-1118 C**

The entity referred to by the military as Zeus pushed the Grey Goose to the limits of its speed, desperate to get the bomb as far away from Manhattan as he could. The human he saw as his sister was there; if he failed now, the only person he truly cared about would die in a nuclear fire.

He thought about all those that had died; the civilians that had succumbed to the virus Dr. Alexander Mercer had released in Penn Station. That being had been a monster in the guise of a man, even more so than the thing that now wore his skin.

The helicopter finally cleared the minimum safe distance. With a quick button press, the chopper released its hold on the nuclear device, sending it plunging into the Atlantic Ocean. The hooded man wheeled the helicopter around and sped back towards land, but he knew it was a pointless gesture; the timer had run out.

With a flash of brilliant light, the nuke detonated. The effects were dampened by the water, but it still expanded faster than the fleeing craft. As the fire reached him, the sentient virus that bore the name and face of Alex Mercer closed his glowing blue eyes and accepted his fate.

**DX-1118 C**

Alex truly never expected to be able to open his eyes again. But he did.

He never expected to be standing atop the corner of a building in Times Square again. But he was.

Mercer rose from his crouch and stared about the city in shock. There was no trace of the infection; the sky was a clear blue instead of the red tint he had come to know. The street wasn't filled with rubble from clashes between the military and the infected. Civilians milled about aimlessly as if nothing was wrong. Everything looked as pristine as it was before all of the madness happened.

"What happened to me?" he whispered. Had he died? Was this the afterlife, a chance to fix things? One thing was for certain, he needed to figure out what was going on.

Checking to make sure the alley below was unoccupied, Alex stepped off the side of the building, falling three stories. Shifting his biomass until he wasn't quite so dense, he landed without his usual entrance of shattered pavement. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he assimilated himself into the crowd.

Spying a newspaper stand, he made his way there. After scanning the headlines, he came to the conclusion that he definitely wasn't in _his_ Manhattan any more.

_His_ Manhattan wasn't home to masked vigilantes, armored superheroes, and super-powered mutants. Ok, maybe it did have _him_, but that obviously didn't count.

A strange thought struck Alex as he pondered this. This was a city that _hadn't_ been ripping itself apart to fight the most lethal virus ever released on the world. This was a relatively quiet New York, a chance to finally do something other than kill. There was no Blackwatch here. No Redlight. No need for him to hunt anymore.

A chance for the peace he had been denied for so long.

At least, that's what he thought…

**DX-1118 C**

Contrary to popular belief, Alex didn't necessarily need to hunt to survive. The gnawing, insatiable, maddening _hunger_ only came upon him when he was moments away from an imminent death; that was when his biomass was at an all-time low, and needed to be replenished. He had a fairly decent regeneration rate, and, given time, could restore all of his lost biomass to its former maximum. His biomass was a nifty thing, but he could only consume and compress a certain amount before it became too much effort to maintain a human form. Beyond that limit, he ended up looking like a monster in a very literal sense of the word.

He had been living in this strange yet familiar new world for little under a month now. In that time, he had consumed a random lowlife thug and taken over his life. Using his new face (and the memories that had come with it), Alex had systematically hunted down a minor crime ring and it's boss, using the crooks' ill-gotten wealth to set himself up with a new-if somewhat false-life.

Dr. Alexander Jonathan Mercer, PhD: geneticist by education; all-around genius by experience. By that he meant the experiences of the thousands he had consumed and the memories he had obtained from them. The collective knowledge of thousands of soldiers and average citizens had essentially made him into one of the smartest men on the planet, and that was being modest.

This brilliance had not gone unnoticed. A representative from the Stark Industries Medical Division had approached him with a job opening as a senior geneticist, working on the cures for various diseases. Oh, the irony; a sentient virus working to cure other viruses. It had been a welcome change from his time at Gentek, where he had been contracted to construct lethal biological weapons to be used on enemies of America. Not his finest moment.

He had grown to enjoy his time here. Fellow brilliant scientists working towards a common goal of saving human lives; Alex saw it as his redemption. His coworkers had come to appreciate his quiet, friendly demeanor. Some were jealous of his prowess; some ignored him; and a small minority could call him friend.

Of course, he should have known that this newfound peace wouldn't last forever. It was only a matter of time before someone dangerous got wind of what Alex and his compatriots were working on. Someone had hired a mercenary to break into Stark Industries Medical Division and abscond with their work. They should have hired someone with more…finesse.

"Rhino?" screeched one of his coworkers as he took cover behind a thrown desk. "Out of all of the people AIM could have hired to steal our work, they contracted _him_ of all people?"

"Hmph," was Alex's only response. Alex O'Hirn, AKA The Rhino; big, stupid, and covered in a thick hide that basically allowed him to weather most heroes' blows with impunity. Luckily, Alex wasn't most people. A single Hunter was more of a challenge than this chump.

He had told himself that he wouldn't get involved in the day to day drama between superheroes and supervillains, but he would be damned if he let these people be hurt on his watch. Besides, it was high time for some excitement.

Time to play.

As the thick-skinned rhinoceros look-alike charged through the office towards him, Mercer stood his ground, ignoring the exclamations of his coworkers to get out of the way. As the brute raised a titanic foot to crush the man, Alex flickered out of sight. Rhino blinked.

He reappeared directly in Rhino's face, crushing his horn with one hand and cocking the other fist back to deliver an almighty punch to Rhino's jaw. The result was Rhino, now squealing in pain, soaring back through the office hallway and out the window at the end of it. The wannabe supervillain fell five stories and landed with an explosion of rubble.

Alex merely dusted off his leather jacket, which had reformed over him in place of the labcoat he wore for work. As his coworkers hesitantly emerged from cover, they looked at their superior with nothing less than awe in their eyes.

"You're one of them?"

Well, at least some of them were awed. This prick was the one Alex had had the most problems with, always criticizing his flawless work and badmouthing the people Alex had come to respect: the superheroes.

"You mean a metahuman? No. I'm fairly certain you have to be human to qualify," he drawled lazily, ignoring the shocked looks on some of their faces. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go kill that pest and be done with him. I mean seriously, with the frequency he goes to jail and his subsequent breakouts, coupled with all of the property damage and lives lost during his rampages, it's a wonder no one's put him down yet."

The mass of scientists parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses as he strolled over to the destroyed window. He turned to face them once more. "It's been good working with you guys, and I don't regret my time spent here. But now, I think it's time for me to move on. Go ahead and tell Stark that I quit."

Snapping a lazy two-fingered salute and a roguish grin to his (now former) coworkers, he fell backwards out of the window, gyrating fluidly and condensing his biomass as he fell. The result was an even larger crater as Mercer landed in Rhino's crater.

The injured crook was attempting to stand again when the shockwave forced him back down. He turned his head to look at the hooded man, who was casually ambling towards him with his hands swinging loosely at his sides, whistling a tune even.

"Who…who the hell are you?!" he shrieked.

The man stopped only a few feet away from the downed villain, casualness vanishing, replaced by a cold, predatory, _hungry_ look.

"I'm your executioner." With that, Alex let biomass run down his arms, shapeshifting the limbs into a set of vicious claws each longer than his arms were previously, harsh black spikes further disfiguring what had previously been human-shaped arms.

Cradling his mangled horn with one hand, Rhino attempted to crawl away from the terrifying creature that had been disguised as a man. The effort was futile as Alex leapt onto his back claws first, dragging his claws through the thick skin like a hot knife through butter, courtesy of his inhuman strength and the wicked sharpness of the mono-molecular claws themselves. Rhino howled in pain as tendrils of biomass crept into the open wounds, beginning the consumption of the massive man. His screams became even more high-pitched as the tendrils reached even deeper, continuing to feed their wielder, who remained unmoved by the man's pitiful squeals.

For all of his thrashing and screeching, O'Hirn's efforts were for naught. The man finally fell silent as the tendrils finished their job, dragging the pitiful remnants of the former villain into Mercer's body for complete digestion. Alex suppressed the influx of memories for later viewing; he didn't want to deal with the headache they would bring right now.

As the tendrils of virus hungrily scoured the crater for the last traces of O'Hirn's blood, Alex looked around the rim of the crater. It was lined with civilians, mouths open in shock and pools of vomit at the feet of some. Alex had to admit, his consuming was undoubtedly an incredibly disturbing sight.

He willed his arms to shapeshift back to normal as he leapt up and out of the hole. As one, the crowd of civilians backed away to give him some space. Alex let his gaze sweep the crowd, seeing the fear in some of their eyes. He sighed. He didn't want people to look at him like that, not anymore.

"Look..." he began. "I'm sorry you had to see that. My method of dealing with people like that is...kind of permanent." He let out a sheepish grin. "At least you won't have to worry about that mook running around anymore, right?"

Some of the crowd began to get over their fear and approach him. A few even began to congratulate him on taking down Rhino for good. Alex smiled at this; he had thought they would be angry. "What's your hero name?" one of the younger ones asked suddenly.

Alex took a moment to think. Did he really want to live that life? It only took him a moment to decide in the affirmative. He could always use his alias of Zeus, but then again, he never really had liked it. Searching his memories, he decided on a suitable choice.

"Call me Blacklight."

**And that is that! My first attempt at a Prototype/Marvel crossover, and I don't think I did too badly, if I do say so myself.**

**I'm getting the feeling that I'm going to catch some flak for killing off Rhino in the first chapter, but I think I needed to demonstrate that while this version of Alex is a good guy (He used his viral powers to protect the common citizens in his dimension from both Blackwatch and the Redlight monsters; it's what I did in-game.), he is still more than willing to kill threats. He doesn't just let them go to let them hurt those close to him again.**

**Oh, and one more note. I realize that there already is a Blacklight in the Marvel-verse. I'm just ignoring her. Mercer deserves that name more. :p**

**Until next time. Laz out!**


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